Madness and Civilization

The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.

I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.

For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human.

Leprosy withdrew, leaving derelict these low places and these rites which were intended, not to suppress it, but to keep it at a sacred distance, to fix it in an inverse exaltation.

In a strange reversibility that is the opposite of good works and prayer, they are saved by the hand that is not stretched out.

Often the cities of Europe must have seen these "ships of fools" approaching their harbors.

He is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely.

He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage.

In a comedy where each man deceives the other and dupes himself, the madman is comedy to the second degree: the deception of deception.

The head that will become a skull is already empty. Madness is the deja-la of death.

What death unmasks was never more than a mask; to discover the grin of the skeleton, one need only lift off something that was neither beauty nor truth, but only a plaster and tinsel face.

The neck of the Gutememch is endlessly elongated, the better to illustrate, beyond wisdom, all the real mediations of knowledge; and the symbolic man becomes a fantastic bird whose disproportionate neck folds a thousand times upon itself-an insane being, halfway between animal and thing, closer to the charms of an image than to the rigor of a meaning.

And by an astonishing reversal, it is now the animal that will stalk man, capture him, and reveal him to his own truth.

While the man of reason and wisdom perceives only fragmentary and all the more unnerving images of it, the Fool bears it intact as an unbroken sphere.

Victory is neither God's nor the Devil's: it belongs to Madness. On all sides, madness fascinates man.

If madness is the truth of knowledge, it is because knowledge is absurd, and instead of addressing itself to the great book of experience, loses its way in the dust of books and in idle debate.

This man, uglier than a monkey, imagines himself handsome as Nereus; that one thinks he is Euclid because he has traced three lines with a compass.

We owe the invention of the arts to deranged imaginations; the Caprice of Painters, Poets, and Musicians is only a name moderated in civility to express their Madness.

Truthful, too, because the crime hidden from all eyes dawns like day in the night of this strange punishment; madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning.

Madness dissipated can be only the same thing as the imminence of the end; 'and even one of the signs by which they realized that the sick man was dying, was that he had returned so easily from madness to reason.'

It marks the point toward which converge, apparently, the tragic destinies of the characters, and from which, in reality, emerge the lines leading to happiness regained.

Behold it moored now, made fast among things and men. Retained and maintained. No longer a ship but a hospital.

By a strange act of force, the classical age was to reduce to silence the madness whose voices the Renaissance had just liberated, but whose violence it had already tamed.

The directors having for these purposes stakes, irons, prisons, and dungeons in the said Hopital General and the places thereto appertaining so much as they deem necessary, no appeal will be accepted from the regulations they establish.

A quasi-absolute sovereignty, jurisdiction without appeal, a writ of execution against which nothing can prevail-the Hopital General is a strange power that the King establishes between the police and the courts, at the limits of the law: a third order of repression.

The great hospitals, houses of confinement, establishments of religion and public order, of assistance and punishment, of governmental charity and welfare measures, are a phenomenon of the classical period.

What, then, was the reality represented by this entire population which almost overnight found itself shut up, excluded more severely than the lepers?

Our philanthropy prefers to recognize the signs of a benevolence toward sickness where there is only a condemnation of idleness.

In 1532, the Parlement of Paris decided to arrest beggars and force them to work in the sewers of the city, chained in pairs.

The militia, which was to become, in the mythology of popular terror, 'the archers of the Hopital,' began to hunt down beggars and herd them into the different buildings of the Hopital.

For these people live like savages without being married, nor buried, nor baptized; and it is this licentious liberty which causes so many to rejoice in vagabondage.

It is giving to one what you take away from another; putting a vagabond in an honest man's employment, and putting diligence on the tenters to find out some other work to maintain his family.

As for that power, its special characteristic, of abolishing poverty, labor-according to the classical interpretation-possessed it not so much by its productive capacity as by a certain force of moral enchantment.

The sin of idleness is the supreme pride of man once he has fallen, the absurd pride of poverty.

The asylum was substituted for the lazar house, in the geography of haunted places as in the landscape of the moral universe.

It will serve as askesis, as punishment, as symptom of a certain disposition of the heart.

In the shadows of the bourgeois city is born this strange republic of the good which is imposed by force on all those suspected of belonging to evil.

If wild beasts can be broken to the yoke, it must not be despaired of correcting the man who has strayed.

But in less than a half-century, it had been sequestered and, in the fortress of confinement, bound to Reason, to the rules of morality and to their monotonous nights.

The light in which confession was made and punishment executed could alone balance the darkness from which evil issued.

One went to see the keeper display the madmen the way the trainer at the Fair of Saint-Germain put the monkeys through their tricks.

Madness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long since been suppressed.

Madness borrowed its face from the mask of the beast.

Madness borrowed its face from the mask of the beast.

In the morning, one no sooner opened his door than he ran in his shirt into the inner court, taking ice and snow by the fistful, applying it to his breast and letting it melt with a sort of delectation.

In the reduction to animality, madness finds both its truth and its cure; when the madman has become a beast, this presence of the animal in man, a presence which constituted the scandal of madness, is eliminated: not that the animal is silenced, but man himself is abolished.

In any case, it was this animality of madness which confinement glorified, at the same time that it sought to avoid the scandal inherent in the immorality of the unreason.

After Port-Royal, men would have to wait two centuries-until Dostoievsky and Nietzsche-for Christ to regain the glory of his madness, for scandal to recover its power as revelation, for unreason to cease being merely the public shame of reason.

Madness is the lowest point of humanity to which God submitted in His incarnation, thereby showing that there was nothing inhuman in man that could not be redeemed and saved.

It was not a question of tending toward a determinism, but of being swallowed up by a darkness.

The humors which are customarily agitated by certain passions dispose those in whom they abound to the same passions, and to thinking of the objects which ordinarily excite them.

Passion indicates, at a new, deeper level, that the soul and the body are in a perpetual metaphorical relation in which qualities have no need to be communicated because they are already common to both.

Madness, made possible by passion, threatened by a movement proper to itself what had made passion itself possible.

For example, a man who supposes in his sleep that he is being accused of a crime, immediately associates this idea with that of its satellites-judges, executioners, the gibbet.

He is mad when he posits as an affirmation of his death—when he suggests as having some value as truth—the still-neutral content of the image 'I am dead.'

The marvelous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language.

In short, under the chaotic and manifest delirium reigns the order of a secret delirium.

The body and the traces it conceals, the soul and the images it perceives, are here no more than stages in the syntax of delirious language.

This word is derived from lira, a furrow; so that deliro actually means to move out of the furrow, away from the proper path of reason.

It is in this delirium, which is of both body and soul, of both language and image, of both grammar and physiology, that all the cycles of madness conclude and begin.

Delirium is the dream of waking persons.

It is madness which takes its original nature from the dream and reveals in this kinship that it is a liberation of the image in the dark night of reality.

Madness is precisely at the point of contact between the oneiric and the erroneous; it traverses, in its variations, the surface on which they meet, the surface which both joins and separates them.

Dazzlement is night in broad daylight, the darkness that rules at the very heart of what is excessive in light's radiance.

Descartes closes his eyes and plugs up his ears the better to see the true brightness of essential daylight; thus he is secured against the dazzlement of the madman who, opening his eyes, sees only night, and not seeing at all, believes he sees when he imagines.

Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.

A truth, in any case, that is instantaneous, since its appearance can only be its disappearance; the lightning-flash is seen only in the already advancing night.

Unreason can appear only for a moment, the instant when language enters silence, when delirium itself is stilled, when the heart is at last devoured.

Some think that they are vessels of glass, and for this reason recoil from passers-by, lest they break; others fear death, which they yet cause most often to themselves.

Some think that they are vessels of glass, and for this reason recoil from passers-by, lest they break; others fear death, which they yet cause most often to themselves.

This cooling of the body is the ordinary effect which follows immoderate heat once it has thrown off and exhausted its vigor.

Usually they have the quasi-immediate rapidity and the absolute transparence of luminous rays; but in melancholia, they are charged with darkness; they become 'obscure, opaque, shadowy'; and the images of things which they bear to the brain and to the mind are veiled with 'shadow and with shades.'

It is this languishing flow, these choked vessels, this heavy, clogged blood that the heart labors to distribute throughout the organism, and which has difficulty penetrating into the very fine arterioles of the brain.

Is not such pernicious mobility that of an infernal water, sulfurous liquid, those aquae stygiae, ex nitro, vitriolo, antimonio, arsenico, et similibus exstillatae: its particles are in perpetual movement.

The essence of mania is desertic, sandy.

The essence of mania is desertic, sandy.

On the other, a parched and desenic world, a panic world where all was flight, disorder, instantaneous gesture.

The combination of mania and melancholy is not, for Willis, a disease; it is a secret fire in which flame and smoke are in conflict; it is the vehicle of that light and that shadow.

Of course the image of flame and smoke disappeared in Willis's successors; but it was still by images that the work of organization was accomplished.

The images assured the initial role of synthesis, that their organizing force made possible a structure of perception, in which at last the symptoms could attain their significant value.

In one case, the overheated spirits are subject to a reciprocal pressure which may give the impression that they are exploding-provoking those irregular or preternatural movements whose insane aspect constitutes hysterical convulsions.

What has so often been the subterfuge of so much ignorance we take as the object of our treatment and our remedies.

In which their mien is similar to alembics featly resting upon cylinders, without one's being able to see the fire from without, yet if one looks beneath the alembic, and places one's hand upon a woman's heart, one will find in both places a fiery furnace.

Hysteria is indiscriminately mobile or immobile, fluid or dense, given to unstable vibrations or clogged by stagnant humors.

And so the womb, though it be so strictly attached to the parts we have described that it may not change place, yet often changes position, and makes curious and so to speak petulant movements in the woman's body.

It was, not so much a question of escaping the old localization in the uterus, but of discovering the principle and the pathways of a diverse, polymorphous disease dispersed throughout the entire body.

The hysterical body was thus given over to that disorder of the spirits which, outside of all organic laws and any functional necessity, could successively seize upon all the available spaces of the body.

Actually suffering from the disordered and excessive movement of spirits, the organ imitates its own illness; starting from a defect in the movement within internal space, it imitates a disorder that strictly belongs to itself.

This internal space which has become permeable and porous is perhaps only the laxity of the heart.

This is the movement of a succession of ivory balls.

The entire female body is riddled by obscure but strangely direct paths of sympathy; it is always in an immediate complicity with itself, to the point of forming a kind of absolutely privileged site for the sympathies.

A body too close to itself, too intimate in each of its parts, an organic space which is, in a sense, strangely constricted: this is what the theme common to hysteria and hypochondria has now become.

The hysteric's unconsciousness is only the reverse of his sensibility.

What had been blindness would become unconsciousness, what had been error would become fault, and everything in madness that designated the paradoxical manifestation of non-being would become the natural punishment of a moral evil.

Against the vapors, the spirits are reinforced 'by the most stinking odors'; disagreeable sensation vivifies the spirits, which in a sense rebel and vigorously flock to the place where the assault must be repelled.

It is evident here that an imagery of wonder-working iron governs discursive thought and prevails over observation itself.

By the end of the century, it became customary to inoculate scabies in the most resistant cases of mania.

Among the dissolvants, Raulin also cites honey, chimney soot, Oriental saffron, wood lice, powdered lobster claw, and bezoar.

In the Middle Ages, the traditional treatment of a maniac was to plunge him several times into water 'until he had lost his strength and forgotten his fury.'

The only care that must he taken, is to plunge the sufferers into the water suddenly and unawares, and to keep them there for a long time.

Woe to the human race, if this prejudice extends its reign to the common people; there will be no more plowmen, artisans, soldiers, for they will soon be robbed of the strength and vigor necessary to their profession.

Such violence promised the rebirth of a baptism.

The rolling of the sea, the most regular, the most natural movement in the world, and the one most in accord with cosmic order—that same movement which De Lancre once considered so dangerous for the human heart.

It is both a 'falling in step' and a conversion, since movement prescribes its rhythm, but constitutes, by its novelty or variety, a constant appeal to the mind to leave itself and return to the world.

The melancholia was driven out, without the rotation having had time to release the manic agitation.

Man, as unity of soul and body, followed the cycle of harmony in a reverse direction, redescending from the harmonious to the harmonic.

The nervous system vibrates with the music that fills the air; the fibers are like so many "deaf dancers" whose movement keeps time to a music they do not hear.

A single string still vibrates in them, that of pain; have courage enough to pluck it.

A purely psychological medicine was made possible only when madness was alienated in guilt.

A completely exterior Cogito, alien to cogitation itself, and which can be imposed upon it only in the form of an invasion.

Illusion can cure the illusory—while reason alone can free from the unreasonable.

The same language must continue to make itself understood, merely bringing a new deductive element to the rigor of its discourse. Yet this element is not indifferent; the problem is not to pursue the delirium, but by continuing it to bring it to an end.

The artificial reconstitution of delirium constitutes the real distance in which the sufferer recovers his liberty.

The exchange of non-being with itself is carried out in this ingenious play: the non-being of delirium is turned against the being of the illness, and suppresses it by the simple fact that it is driven out of the delirium by dramatic representation.

I gave up most books; I turned my eyes to the works of nature, which addressed all my senses in a language that neither time nor nations can corrupt.

For it has the power of freeing man from his freedom.

In a space so arranged, madness will never again be able to speak the language of unreason, with all that in it transcends the natural phenomena of disease.

And it is precisely here that psychology was born—not as the truth of madness, but as a sign that madness was now detached from its truth which was unreason.

It was the first time since the Great Confinement that the madman had become a social individual; it was the first time that anyone had entered into conversation with him, and that, once again, he was questioned.

As if, at the moment of its triumph, reason revived and permitted to drift on the margins of order a character whose mask it had fashioned in derision-a sort of double in which it both recognized and revoked itself.

The name of Bicetre is a word no one can pronounce without an inexpressible feeling of repugnance, of horror and contempt.

The doctor came, once the conversion of images was effected, the disease having already assumed the ambiguous aspects of fermentation, of corruption, of tainted exhalations, of decomposed flesh.

The ideal was an asylum which, while preserving its essential functions, would be so organized that the evil could vegetate there without ever spreading; an asylum where unreason would be entirely contained and offered as a spectacle, without threatening the spectators.

Such nights were peopled with inaccessible pleasures; such corrupt and ravaged faces became masks of voluptuousness; against these dark landscapes appeared forms-pains and delights-which echoed Hieronymus Bosch and his delirious gardens.

Sadism is not a name finally given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination.

Do not glory in your state, if you are wise and civilized men; an instant suffices to disturb and annihilate that supposed wisdom of which you are so proud.

The English kill themselves without any apparent reason for doing so; they kill themselves in the very lap of happiness.

Time was thus assigned to an organized happiness, which left no leisure for empty passions, for disgust with life, for boredom.

The change of air, the length of the road, absence from home, distance from the things which upset them, their associations with other pilgrims, the slow and energetic movement of walking, had more effect upon them than the comfortable journeys.

The moment at which our women rise in Paris is far removed from that which nature has indicated; the best hours of the day have slipped away; the purest air has disappeared; no one has benefited from it.

A girl who at ten reads instead of running will, at twenty, be a woman with the vapors and not a good nurse.

One is horrified upon entering these asylums of misery and affliction; one hears only cries of despair, yet here dwells the man distinguished by his talents and his virtues.

The struggle against the established powers, against the family, against the Church, continues at the very heart of confinement, in the saturnalia of reason.

The scandal lies only in the fact that the madmen are the brutal truth of confinement, the passive instrument of all that is worst about it.

Hence an abyss yawns in the middle of confinement; a void which isolates madness, denounces it for being irreducible, unbearable to reason.

In short, a people would be poor which had no paupers.

The 'Poor Man' was a vague notion in which were combined that wealth which is Man and the state of Need which is acknowledged as essential to humanity.

The moment could come when 'the ever multiplying foundations would ultimately absorb all funds and all private property.'

If all the men who ever lived had had a tomb, it would have been quite necessary, in order to find land to cultivate, to overturn these sterile monuments, and to stir the ashes of the dead in order to feed the living.

This is the moment when madness actually takes possession of confinement, while confinement itself is divested of its other forms of utility.

And by a regression, which was to be of great importance for the future, madmen were brought under the sway of immediate and unchecked measures adopted not even against dangerous criminals, but against marauding beasts.

The indigent and the old have before their eyes nothing but chains, bars, and bolts.

The confrontation of the wise, firm philanthropist and the paralytic monster.

Religious segregation has a very precise meaning: it does not attempt to preserve the sufferers from the profane presence of non-Quakers, but to place the insane individual within a moral element where he will be in debate with himself and his surroundings: to constitute for him a milieu where, far from being protected, he will be kept in a perpetual anxiety, ceaselessly threatened by Law and Transgression.

Now madness would never—could never—cause fear again; it would be afraid, without recourse or return, thus entirely in the hands of the pedagogy of good sense, of truth, and of morality.

Tuke created an asylum where he substituted for the free terror of madness the stifling anguish of responsibility; fear no longer reigned on the other side of the prison gates, it now raged under the seals of conscience.

Incessantly cast in this empty role of unknown visitor, and challenged in everything that can be known about him, drawn to the surface of himself by a social personality silently imposed by observation, by form and mask, the madman is obliged to objectify himself in the eyes of reason as the perfect stranger.

Madness no longer exists except as seen. The proximity instituted by the asylum, an intimacy neither chains nor bars would ever violate again, does not allow reciprocity.

The space reserved by society for insanity would now be haunted by those who were 'from the other side' and who represented both the prestige of the authority that confines and the rigor of the reason that judges.

So that what, in their violence, it was once obligatory to interpret as profanations or blasphemies, it would henceforth be necessary to see as an incessant attack against the Father.

The asylum, always oriented to anachronistic structures and symbols, would be, par excellence, inadapted and out of time.

The asylum is a religious domain without religion, a domain of pure morality, of ethical uniformity.

Henceforth, the essential madness, and the really dangerous one, was that which rose from the lower depths of society.

Henceforth, more genuinely confined than he could have been in a dungeon and chains, a prisoner of nothing but himself, the sufferer was caught in a relation to himself that was of the order of transgression, and in a non-relation to others that was of the order of shame.

Delivered from his chains, he is now chained, by silence, to transgression and to shame.

He is now pitilessly observed by himself. And in the silence of those who represent reason, and who have done nothing but hold up the perilous mirror, he recognizes himself as objectively mad.

Awareness was now linked to the shame of being identical to that other, of being compromised in him, and of already despising oneself before being able to recognize or to know oneself.

The desired result was not long in coming: 'Her repentance was announced by a torrent of tears which she shed for almost two hours.'

Madness escaped from the arbitrary only in order to enter a kind of endless trial for which the asylum furnished simultaneously police, magistrates, and torturers.

It is not as a scientist that homo medicus has authority in the asylum, but as a wise man.

If the medical personage could isolate madness, it was not because he knew it, but because he mastered it; and what for positivism would be an image of objectivity was only the other side of this domination.

It is by bringing such powers into play, by wearing the mask of Father and of Judge, that the physician, by one of those abrupt short cuts that leave aside mere medical competence, became the almost magic perpetrator of the cure, and assumed the aspect of a Thaumaturge.

Increasingly the patient would accept this self-surrender to a doctor both divine and satanic, beyond human measure in any case; increasingly he would alienate himself in the physician, accepting entirely and in advance all his prestige, submitting from the very first to a will he experienced as magic, and to a science he regarded as prescience and divination.

But if the doctor soon became a thaumaturge for the patient, he could not be one in his own positivist doctor's eyes.

Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason.

Goya's forms are born out of nothing: they have no background, in the double sense that they are silhouetted against only the most monotonous darkness, and that nothing can assign them their origin, their limit, and their nature.

The relation established by Rousseau is precisely reversed; sovereignty no longer transposes the natural existence; the latter is only an object for the sovereign, which permits him to measure his total liberty.

The night of madness is thus limitless; what might have been supposed to be man's violent nature was only the infinity of non-nature.

The nothingness of unreason, in which the language of Nature had died forever, has become a violence of Nature and against Nature, to the point of the savage abolition of itself.

Nietzsche's madness—that is, the dissolution of his thought—is that by which his thought opens out onto the modem world.

There is no madness except as the final instant of the work of art—the work endlessly drives madness to its limits; where there is a work of art, there is no madness.

After paying your money, you were led by a guide into the section for the insane.

His health is fading greatly; it is to be hoped that he will soon die.

I knew, as did everyone, that Bicetre was both hospital and prison; but I did not know that the hospital had been built to nurture sickness, the prison to nurture crime.

One would have said that Nature, weary of her own works, was ready to mingle all the elements together in order to force them into new forms.

Michel Foucault died in June 1984.

The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.

I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.

For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human.

Leprosy withdrew, leaving derelict these low places and these rites which were intended, not to suppress it, but to keep it at a sacred distance, to fix it in an inverse exaltation.

Often the cities of Europe must have seen these "ships of fools" approaching their harbors.

In a comedy where each man deceives the other and dupes himself, the madman is comedy to the second degree: the deception of deception.

The head that will become a skull is already empty. Madness is the deja-la of death.

While the man of reason and wisdom perceives only fragmentary and all the more unnerving images of it, the Fool bears it intact as an unbroken sphere.

Madness dissipated can be only the same thing as the imminence of the end; 'and even one of the signs by which they realized that the sick man was dying, was that he had returned so easily from madness to reason.'

The directors having for these purposes stakes, irons, prisons, and dungeons in the said Hopital General and the places thereto appertaining so much as they deem necessary, no appeal will be accepted from the regulations they establish.

A quasi-absolute sovereignty, jurisdiction without appeal, a writ of execution against which nothing can prevail-the Hopital General is a strange power that the King establishes between the police and the courts, at the limits of the law: a third order of repression.

The asylum was substituted for the lazar house, in the geography of haunted places as in the landscape of the moral universe.

One went to see the keeper display the madmen the way the trainer at the Fair of Saint-Germain put the monkeys through their tricks.

Madness borrowed its face from the mask of the beast.

In the morning, one no sooner opened his door than he ran in his shirt into the inner court, taking ice and snow by the fistful, applying it to his breast and letting it melt with a sort of delectation.

In the reduction to animality, madness finds both its truth and its cure; when the madman has become a beast, this presence of the animal in man, a presence which constituted the scandal of madness, is eliminated: not that the animal is silenced, but man himself is abolished.

For example, a man who supposes in his sleep that he is being accused of a crime, immediately associates this idea with that of its satellites-judges, executioners, the gibbet.

The marvelous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language.

Dazzlement is night in broad daylight, the darkness that rules at the very heart of what is excessive in light's radiance.

Of course the image of flame and smoke disappeared in Willis's successors; but it was still by images that the work of organization was accomplished.

And it is precisely here that psychology was born—not as the truth of madness, but as a sign that madness was now detached from its truth which was unreason.

Such nights were peopled with inaccessible pleasures; such corrupt and ravaged faces became masks of voluptuousness; against these dark landscapes appeared forms-pains and delights-which echoed Hieronymus Bosch and his delirious gardens.

This is the moment when madness actually takes possession of confinement, while confinement itself is divested of its other forms of utility.

Now madness would never—could never—cause fear again; it would be afraid, without recourse or return, thus entirely in the hands of the pedagogy of good sense, of truth, and of morality.

Madness no longer exists except as seen. The proximity instituted by the asylum, an intimacy neither chains nor bars would ever violate again, does not allow reciprocity.

If the medical personage could isolate madness, it was not because he knew it, but because he mastered it; and what for positivism would be an image of objectivity was only the other side of this domination.

Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason.

Nietzsche's madness—that is, the dissolution of his thought—is that by which his thought opens out onto the modem world.